Opinion: ICE Buys NYSE

This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.

... welcome back to Opinion Journal Live on here with the system editor James Freeman ... James event ... of well off were to talk about the lace acquisition York stock Exchange and I don't think I could do any better than to simply read the lead sentence of the Wall Street Journal's editorial on this acquisition it was called isn't ... that derivatives trading platform younger than Justin Bieber is about to acquire the New York Stock Exchange with ... traces its Wall Street lineage to seventeen ninety two ... that's right yet and B it doesn't an amazing um in in ... in some ways I you think of ... in the technology business we certainly have seen on software companies that seem to sprout up overnight in all the sudden they dominate the media landscape in the ... and this is this is partly in technology story out ... of ... place ... IntercontinentalExchange a purchaser here it's ... actually based in Atlanta Georgia budgets of the sort of a part of the company for years has been this so ... loved in energy trading operation ... aam it it really I was a pioneer in the moving of ... a lot of different financial instruments on do electronic ... trading platforms and instead of the old but with the cold open outcry system with guys signaling imminent prayer each other ... well you think what's going on here is an example of flow positive creative destruction nor is there some regulatory destruction ... there isn't a thing ... it's when you when you look at how are you so it came to the kind of of ... a ... heavyweight in the financial world the founded in two thousand of its partly you know that they recognize early on that the ... well and and and in particular for futures and swaps trading I was a ... very friendly environment of business and to ... um ... meanwhile New York Stock Exchange traditional equity trading has really been pounded by US regulators of both on the ... Sarbanes Oxley corporate accounting rules that have really discourage the creation of new companies ... but also on the effort to basically ... break up what was the kind of a club that hold the monopoly the NYSE had in the in the trading above its stocks of the chairs and a ... and that's of a terrible lot of the Fed's observes lor prices but by the turn ... of the NYSE as French as overtime William wanted the franchise was to attract new companies there been very few initial public offerings in the last four or five years I mean that's a familiar story ... that is true that more exchanges were created but these exchanges are regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission ... and there have been some issues about data clarity of that wrong I think people are starting to ask about the system we've created a you look at this over several decades a lot of great benefits for investors use all the rise of a discount stock brokerages and that he can be cheap ... online trading Zen not at all good things wouldn't you know thirty forty years ago you didn't really see that in so that that's on the plus side but also ... initial investors have been a ... a little ... put off by this Mr. run in recent years of assorted technological ... snafu was in the equity markets and having the flash crash in twenty ten was kind of a bigger than the more easily we had a ... nice trading which is now selling itself to get Kayla had that ... big problem last August where they were sent erroneous orders into the market the technology upgrade that the botched in ... the Facebook IPO you seen a lot of these technology problems and so I think it's a ... it makes sense that policymakers should take a look at that the equity markets in this this kind of ... very complicated architecture that the SEC's created know saw this with a lot of mixed messages in the NYC acquisition ...